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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: On Top of It

On Top of It #10: Holiday Market

21 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, On Top of It

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On Top of It #10 by Lisa Martens

Holiday Market

Last year, I sold jewelry at the holiday market in Columbus Circle. This involved standing in the freezing rain with a heater at my feet. My hands and head cold. The soles of my shoes melting. Inching forward and back to wrap necklaces with a bow. Trying to convince people not to place custom orders.

I pretended to know about birthstones and their healing properties, but I can barely tell topaz from an emerald. I don’t actually know the difference between gold-plated and gold-filled chains. But I could fake it, especially for commission.

At the holiday markets, the best bosses give their employees heaters and occasional breaks. Shifts overlap so you can eat snacks instead of just watching everyone with their hot cocoa. The people behind the counters are usually students, the business owners themselves, or people who are not U.S. citizens. They work the longest hours for not a whole lot of pay, and sometimes ask to sit by the heaters of their more fortunate neighbors. If you work the holiday market and need to go to the restroom, just don’t. You could go to the Whole Foods across the street, but then you would need someone to watch your tent while you’re gone. You can lose sales. You can get robbed.

So just don’t go to the bathroom. For ten hours.

The market is magical for tourists and locals, who walk around and get to feel like they’re supporting local businesses, like they’re getting a genuine New York experience. But their incessant demands for customized pieces drain most of the profit. No one walks into a clothing chain or a bookstore and expects the clothes or books to be customized at no additional cost . . . but people visiting holiday markets do. They want this chain with that charm with that animal instead of this animal . . . they want personalized service from this person standing in the cold, not realizing (or not caring) that, hourly, this “local business owner” is making $5 or less an hour off this sale.

So please, as the holiday season enters panic mode, be nice to the retail workers. If you have a lot of gifts, buy some paper and wrap them yourself instead of making someone else do it. We don’t do it better than you, so please don’t make that joke as an excuse. If the shop is busy, tip us for giving you customized service. If you don’t want to tip, then don’t ask for anything special. Do not bicker with guests who are ahead of you in line because you only want to buy one thing and they have an armful of presents. Do not argue with the line—you are not more important than anyone else. My melted shoes and burnt toes agree.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #9: Crap

14 Monday Dec 2015

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On Top of It #9 by Lisa Martens

Crap

As a New York college student who has moved nine times in ten years, I try to live light. I fail, but I try.

I love books, I can’t throw out gifts or cards, and well, to be honest, if I find the five of spades on the street, I just may keep it and hope I find the rest of the deck.

However, I recently did an odd job for a man who had so much stuff that it redefined the word crap for me.

Let me first explain that this man . . . let’s call him Tim . . . didn’t have a hoarding problem. I would never make light of something like that. Tim had once had a store that had gone under, and so he was transitioning from a brick-and-mortar space to an online Amazon store.

Tim. Had. Crap.

He had hundreds of items to put on sale: Obama sex dolls, animal key chains, bobblehead action figures, Wizard of Oz-inspired rubber ducks, zombie socks, mustache pacifiers, cookie cutters in the shape of fetuses, coin banks in the shape of bullets, fake belly buttons, candy g-strings, a mug that said “coffee makes me poop,” a ketchup costume for dogs, toilet bowl lip gloss, a zombie painting of the Mona Lisa . . . the list went on and on.

Pure crap.

Tim had a small apartment, so he paid to have his crap stored. He paid me to take or find photos of his crap, and then he paid me to list his crap online.

He wanted to use the money to fund his other projects, or maybe support his ex-wife or buy things for his new wife. Who knows.

But, and this was kind of a relief, Tim knew he had pointless crap. He wasn’t particularly passionate about the crap or his online store. He saw the crap as a way to generate some income and then, when it became apparent that absolutely no one wanted his crap, he tried to get rid of it online.

As I listed hundreds of these objects online, I thought about the needless accumulation of stuff, and also the lack of passion behind the business of crap. Sometimes I think people’s passion come across, even on the Internet, and the passion draws real people, real results. I saw Tim’s business and it was almost nice to see that his scheme to sell crap didn’t work. Because his heart wasn’t in it, my heart wasn’t in it.

Don’t trade your passion for crap, I think is the point I’m trying to make. You may have to deal with crap, but don’t deal with it in your spare time. Don’t give away all your time and space to fake belly buttons or Wizard of Oz-themed rubber ducks. Save room for the books you love, and for the holiday cards you’ll receive from family members who sort of have their shit together.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #8: Beginning the Getaway

07 Monday Dec 2015

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On Top of It #8 by Lisa Martens

Beginning the Getaway

My grandma owns a small gated community in La Garita, Costa Rica. Since the infancy of my MFA days, I would brush my hair, gaze at the moon, and imagine hosting a writers’ retreat on my family’s property.

hourglass

Plenty of writers have visited us . . . some of whom had to play poker online to make ends meet, but what writer hasn’t taken on odd jobs? And so I wanted to see if there was any interest. I put out a survey in a writers’ Facebook group on November 30, my birthday. (You can wish me a happy birthday in the comments, thank you).

By December 1, I had 87 respondents. I couldn’t believe it! I had folks emailing me asking when the submission period would be, and if they could receive a scholarship. Some writers are offering to hook me up with connections. All seem passionate and eager to form a community. I was shocked, and it was the shot in the arm I needed.

Too often, we write in isolation. NaNoWriMo reminded me that while writing can be a solitary act, there is a community of us and we can all bond over the Internet and over our collective goals to reach people with my writing. Yep, I’m being sappy.

So it’s going to happen. January 2017, Costa Rica writers’ retreat! And possibly more if this proves successful. Here is a small list of things I have to do:

  1. Hire a lawyer on my $10/hour bookseller salary, just to cover liability issues . . .
  2. Create some kind of submission process and timeline
  3. Find a panel of writers to help comb through submissions
  4. Create an itinerary
  5. Find a reliable driver
  6. Yoga?
  7. Food? Allergies?
  8. We’ll have bonfires. Duh. Have to have bonfires.
  9. Exorcise the ghost who lives on my grandma’s property. Unless he helps with the writing.

But I think I can do it. If you’re interested in coming, serving on a panel, or just plain want to give me advice on how the hell to do this (I’ve never even planned a dinner party), please email me at lisaatnormas@gmail.com. That’s the email address I’m using specifically for planning writers’ retreats in Latin America.

Congratulations to anyone who achieved NaNoWriMo, and please take a few weeks to detox from whatever chemicals you used to get through it.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #7: The Customer is Always Right

30 Monday Nov 2015

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On Top of It #7 by Lisa Martens

The Customer is Always Right

Beth walked in to pick up the latest hardcover edition of Stoner by John Williams. At dinner the other night, one of her professor friends had said it was “wonderfully droll” and “brilliantly bland . . . honest.” This was exactly the kind of thing she wanted to read.

There it was, black with colorful stripes, on the display table. She orbited it. She would have liked to flip through it, but each copy was wrapped in plastic. She instead flipped through the new Humans of New York.

She noticed the wooden floors—they could be cleaner. They were gritty, like unbrushed teeth. There was a puff of white dog hair under the display table. A group of wine-scented candles made her sneeze. Someone she didn’t know blessed her.

It wasn’t a big deal, but the music in the store was a little . . . ethnic? Since that new guy started—he was darker, Indian, maybe, or something like that—the music in the store had changed. It was just a little too distracting. They used to play this French tango band, and sometimes classical music. But not anymore.

She wanted to say something, but then it would turn into a political thing. The song was fine if you were studying to be a belly dancer, but for the ambiance of the store—It just didn’t fit. She wasn’t being racist; there were just certain kinds of music you expected in a bookstore.

Beth tried to catch the eye of the thin black woman going through the cookbooks. If she could make eye contact, maybe she could receive some kind of confirmation. If that woman also thought that the music was a bit much, that would prove her point. But no, the woman didn’t look her way. She was engrossed in the different kinds of toast you could make, and then in prison ramen recipes.

Beth wanted the book. She came in for it, she had found it, and she wanted it. But she didn’t move to pick it up. Maybe that was the kind of lesson the store needed.

Beth looked at the mason jars instead. One was blue, like her kitchen’s accent wall, and the other was teal. The blue would match her kitchen, unless it almost matched and didn’t, and that would be even worse than a deliberate, intentional clash. She looked through her phone pictures to try to determine if the blues matched, but even those weren’t reliable since she had used filters on all of her renovated kitchen photos. Using VSCOcam, Beth had made her old kitchen more yellow, and the new kitchen softer with a pastel-like hue.

The song changed to something with fast, shaking drums. Beth sighed. Wouldn’t the store want to distance itself from that part of the world, especially with everything that was going on?

The store had some toys for kids. Beth could get something for her niece. She looked for something girly but not too girly. She didn’t want to enforce gender roles by getting something glittery. Something with science or math, of course, but nothing too masculine. But no, there was nothing that fit that description: something mathematical or scientific, but for five-year-olds, but that was clearly designed for girls, but wasn’t girly.

There was a book on finding constellations. Beth’s niece was probably too smart for that. Beth wrinkled her nose when she saw a wooden walker in the toy section. Everyone knew by now that those were bad for kids.

Beth left without buying anything. It served them right—the store had no Black Friday sales. She still liked the store, but she could probably get Stoner online cheaper, anyway.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #6: Trolls, Predators, Confessions

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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On Top of It #6 by Lisa Martens

Trolls, Predators, Confessions

My Aunt Patricia introduced me to the fine art of trolling chat rooms when I was ten. My parents had just gotten Internet (dial-up, of course) in our grey, two-bedroom Dallas apartment. I don’t remember too much about the apartment: The walls were stained with tobacco as a result of my father’s chain smoking, my seizure pills were kept in the kitchen along with the spices, and a tornado once threw an air conditioner into our balcony. My parents slept on a futon in the living room, I had one bedroom, and the computer occupied the guest room.

Patricia had come to visit us for Christmas—She was eighteen, and I was ten. She was the youngest of my aunts, and the only one of my aunts who looked like me, and so of course I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be thin enough to look good with short hair, wear baggy jeans, and listen to grunge music.

I had pneumonia again that year. Every November, my parents would pull out the dehumidifier, use old antibiotics until they had to take me to the doctor to get new ones, and then eventually take me to the free clinic because we didn’t have insurance. It was also the same place I went to get my blood drawn every three months to make sure my seizure pills were not damaging my immune system or liver.

I had my antibiotics and my inhaler, and since Patricia didn’t have a car and my parents had to work, we spent most of our time either renting tapes from Blockbuster or making up fake identities and chatting with people online. I thought it was hilarious. Men believed absolutely anything we said.

And, usually, they directed the conversation towards sex. I knew as much about sex as I knew about the Internet. As a chronically sick ten-year-old, the only contact I had ever had with a man was during one of my many doctor visits: When they had to determine how much fluid was in my lungs, when they had to put wires on my head to monitor my brain activity, when they had to take blood out of my arms, when they had to give my parents the disappointing news that yes, my brain was still all over the place.

My interest in the Internet dipped for a couple of years. My seizures went away, I had coughs but not as frequently, and, most importantly, my parents bought a house in Plano. A real house—I had neighbors, I could walk to school and to the park, and I didn’t need a ride to see most of my friends. The Internet was that thing where a music video took three hours to load. It was that thing that tied up the phone line and prevented my friends from reaching me. I was not convinced that the Internet was the future.

Then, when I was twelve, we got high-speed Internet.

My friends and I liked to troll Internet chat rooms in the same way we liked to watch “When Animals Attack.” We weren’t going to meet any of these men or have sex with them, but something about it was so appealing, so funny. If you told them anything about yourself, they acted sympathetic for two seconds before redirecting the conversation. You could find a man online who would tell you he loved you after less than a day of IMs. And then, just as quickly, we would block him and walk to Liberty Park, or grab ice cream and go for a swim at the rec center.

The men never had anything in common, not really— They wrote with bright fonts on black backgrounds. They usually had Madonna/Whore complexes and were looking for virgins. But they were all ages, all backgrounds. Some were married with kids and tried to make us feel bad for them:

“Since the baby was born, my wife just doesn’t put out anymore.”

“I love my wife, but she’s always traveling, and I get so lonely. I just want a lady I can love and spoil.”

“My wife and I had an arranged marriage, but we are not in love.”

Some proclaimed that all females were bitches, and dared us to prove them wrong:

“I never met a girl like you. Most girls are so judgmental. But you’re different. I can tell.”

“I wonder . . . are you just like all the others?”

“Most women are bitches or sluts these days. I just want a nice girl.”

My friends and I would usually bend the truth, and we had a few set personas so we didn’t get our lies mixed up. For example, I’m Lisa Marie, but I would usually say my name was Maria. I would say I lived in Dallas, not Plano—another half-truth, because I had lived in Dallas during my epilepsy heyday.

“Do you like older men?”

This was a common question posed to me in AOL chats when I was twelve. It was a bizarre question to me—not for its inappropriateness, which is glaring to me now, but because the only “older” men I knew were my teachers and my father. I did like them, so an honest answer would be something like “Yes, I like my social studies teacher. He lets me wash the blackboard after class, which I find fun for some reason.”

“So what do you like to do?”

Another question that, if taken literally, would disappoint the twenty-nine or forty or sixty-three year old man on the Internet.

“On the weekends, my friends and I like to walk around Stonebriar Mall twice, look at the massage chairs by the skating rink but not use them, then go to that cake store that can make a cookie in the shape of anything. We end the day by maybe buying a shirt or a pair of jeans and meeting our parents in the parking lot. The only reason I’m not there now is because my dad had to work this weekend and my mom has anxiety attacks when she drives.”

“I’m old enough to be your father.”

This brilliant comment, popular among men thirty-five and older, will always have a special place in my heart. My father was eighteen when I was born, meaning he was thirty when I was twelve. Most of the men soliciting me for sex actually were older than my father. They didn’t like to hear it, though. For some reason, being old enough to be my father was sexy, but actually being older than my father was creepy.

Why did we do it? Part of it was boredom, the Texas heat, the lack of a driver’s license, and the sense of immortality only suburban preteens can feel. We didn’t believe any of these men would materialize or hurt us.

The other part was fascination: public schools gave us very little sexual education. My sex ed consisted of photos of STDs followed by a message of DON’T DO IT. One speaker had a Barbie and a Ken Doll. The Ken was covered in velcro, and the speaker stuck the two together. When she pulled them apart, the Barbie doll became mangled from the velcro on Ken. “That’s why women shouldn’t have multiple sexual partners,” she explained. No one answered our questions about condoms, virginity, or pregnancy.

Online, these men were willing to talk to us like we were adults who would potentially have sex with them. They may have been society’s rejects, but we were excited at the idea that someone would answer our questions without referencing what was “right” and what was “wrong.”

One day, after walking home from school, I noticed my neighbor had made it home before I had. I had walked fast, so I was confused. I asked her about it when I went out to get the mail.

“Oh, I sucked this guy’s dick for a ride home,” she said casually. “I met him online.” This was bizarre to me, not because we were in middle school, but because our school was less than a mile away. My neighbor continued to get home before I did.

I discovered Kazaa, started downloading my favorite songs for free, and making my own CDs. (iPods weren’t a thing yet.) I gradually stopped talking to men online. The hangers-on complained that I had changed too much, so I blocked them.

It didn’t matter: North Park Mall had opened by then, so my friends and I had somewhere else to buy cookies in the shape of anything.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #5: Uncle Johnny

09 Monday Nov 2015

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On Top of It #5 by Lisa Martens

Uncle Johnny

I was four, maybe five, the first time I went to Uncle Johnny’s house. Uncle Johnny was my grandfather’s older brother. Even back then, he had a fat gut, he was always red, and he had trouble walking.

I remember that I refused to eat from any of his plates or have a sip of water. This was out of character for me—My father was determined that I would not be a picky eater, and told me it was rude to spit out food or to leave anything on my plate. He would feed me all kinds of things and lie to me about what they were, just so I would eat it and get over any possible squeamishness. Then he would tell me afterwards, with the tone of “Well, you already ate it and liked it, so.”

The issue with Uncle Johnny’s house was not the food. The whole house was dirty. Uncle Johnny had, at any given moment, thirty to forty cats. He had stopped feeding his cats in bowls, and instead placed large bags of cat food at various points in the house—the kitchen, the dining room, the living room—and simply sliced the bags open. The pellets spilled to the floor and the cats came and went as they pleased, ate as they pleased, reproduced as they pleased. He didn’t have any of them fixed or vaccinated. He didn’t count or name them.

The cat smell was in everything. In the bread, the curtains, the floor. The walls were discolored. The backyard, the only place I would ever go, was filled with bones. He usually had injured cats—Cats with infections, missing eyes, or even missing legs. All this in his tiny house on Long Island, in Carle Place, a residential community on Long Island, an all-American suburb, a scene from a nightmare.

When my grandfather took me to Uncle Johnny’s house, they would stay inside and talk. Johnny would fix a sandwich for grandpa; I was polite enough to say I had already eaten. Then they let me walk around the backyard and play with the cats. I did like the cats—I was still a child, and unaware of the amount of pain Johnny must have been in.

The backyard was filled with shallow graves. Uncle Johnny couldn’t bend over very well, so when he buried a dead cat, he did little more than kick some dirt over the body. I would do my best to walk around the bones, but sometimes I stepped on a dusty rib or a jaw. Cat skulls look very unlike cats themselves.

Cats would run around me, look at me suspiciously. Uncle Johnny’s cats did not like to be petted. They hissed or seized when they saw me. Uncle Johnny didn’t seem to notice this—He thought they were all sweet and kind.

Sometimes I would find kittens mewing, fur matted. Other times I would see a cat with a missing eye or a deep wound. They licked their injuries and glared at me—green eyes, blue eyes. They were black, white, spotted, orange, grey. None of them had collars. They were in his roof, in his walls.

After a couple of hours, my grandpa would come and get me. I would usually be sitting on the back porch watching the cats. Then we would go out for dinner and eat. I would be starving by then. I think my grandpa knew why I didn’t want to eat there, and that’s why he treated me. We never talked about it.

Uncle Johnny had no children, no family except for his siblings and, by extension, their families. He had fought in the Korean War very briefly, then he served as a cook. He had also made it to Eagle Scout, and spent a lot of his time volunteering with children until he became too fat to bend down to talk to them. The adults speculated that he lived some kind of alternative lifestyle . . . maybe he could be a pedophile.

I never got that impression from Johnny. I never felt like I was in danger around him, or that he was ever trying to get me alone—unlike some of the waiters who worked for my father, the ones who would pinch my thighs or push me into the pool when I was wearing white clothes. Uncle Johnny was different, hurt, and lonely, but not predatory.

Everyone in our family had the solution for Uncle Johnny—a wife. A wife would get rid of most of the cats, and allow Johnny to have one, maybe two. She would steam wash the carpet, have the walls repainted, sweep the pellets off the floor, get the backyard sodded, and mop the old fashioned way—no Roombas or Swiffer Wet Jets. She would be older, a widow, ideally, so there would be no ex-husband to deal with. She would have had her children young, so they would be grown and Johnny wouldn’t have to deal with that, either. She would be this perfect older lady—polite, classy, timid, one who enjoyed a fixer-upper, the kind of woman who would gently prod Johnny into a normal life.

No one seemed to realize that this was a tall order. This fantasy woman didn’t exist, and if she did, she would take one look at Johnny’s house, turn green and leave.

No one recommended therapy—older men simply didn’t do that. Besides, that was all mumbo-jumbo anyway. Johnny didn’t need help or therapy or cats. He needed a wife. It was almost easier to blame this woman for abandoning him—a woman who didn’t exist, whose magic, virginal powers could save him—than to admit Uncle Johnny was in some kind of pain.

Sometimes, my grandpa and I would take Uncle Johnny away from his terrible house and go to a cemetery. My grandpa took me to cemeteries very often when I was a child—He’d tell me how one day I would be in the ground and so would my mom and even him.

I thought this was ridiculous. My grandpa was the strongest man I knew, way stronger than even my father. He was six feet tall with blue eyes and thick legs. He could jog for miles, and he often had to carry his German Shepherd back home when they went for a walk. When we would go anywhere and I would get tired, I would tell him that my legs were breaking, and then he’d carry me on his shoulders.

But my grandpa assured me over and over that he would die, and that I would die, and that worms would eat my body, and he would tickle me like his fingers were worms, and I would laugh.

Uncle Johnny hung himself when I started graduate school. He had long left his house in Carle Place and given it to a nephew, who had to demolish it because the walls and roof were simply beyond repair. As it turned out, no amount of saintly scrubbing and no angel woman could have fixed that house. Cats had burrowed under it, had scratched through the walls. It was collapsing, it was turning into a litter box. Inspectors shook their head and explained that the house was just not worth salvaging.

The nephew built a new house and dug up the whole yard. No one bothered to count how many cats they found. He built a patio and installed a new fence. Then he married an Asian woman and their beautiful mixed children played in the yard. The neighbors were happier with this arrangement.

Uncle Johnny had to give up his cats. He lived in a retirement community and visited my grandpa once a week.

I found out when I came home from school. I noticed a smell in my kitchen and came in to find blood all over the floor. The refrigerator was broken, and the meat in the freezer was thawing. I did my best to save whatever food I could and mop the blood up.

Then my aunt called. Uncle Johnny had been found hanging in his kitchen. He had been dead about a week, according to his autopsy. He had suffered.

My aunt and my grandpa had to identify the body. She said she couldn’t recognize half of his face. It was purple, swollen. His shirt was brand new. So were his pants. He had bought new clothes to die in. I imagined him at the check out counter at Kohl’s making that last mundane purchase.

There was no note. That bothered my grandpa most of all. He wasn’t helpful when the body was being identified. He just kept saying, over and over, that the person there was not and could not be his brother. My aunt was the one who had to sign off on it.

I got off the phone with my aunt and tried to keep mopping the blood off my kitchen floor. I couldn’t—I started gagging, but there was nothing in my stomach to throw up.

My grandpa entered a state where he could only ask why Johnny hadn’t left a note. He asked everyone. He asked me. No one had an answer to give him. My aunt took over executing Johnny’s will, the funeral arrangements, and cleaning out his apartment. She couldn’t go into the building—the smell was too strong—So her husband and I went there to clean up.

First, they had a team come to clean up the pool of blood, urine, and maggots that had been on the kitchen floor, so we didn’t have to see that. Apparently the police had just taken the body and, once they concluded it was a suicide, thrown their gloves onto the pile of bodily fluids and left. It was up to us to clean everything up.

Then, my uncle and I threw everything into boxes as fast as we could and dragged them out of there. The smell was on anything—I gagged, my uncle tried not to, but I saw his eyes water. My aunt lost weight because she smelled death in all her food and couldn’t eat.

“It’s in my hair,” she complained. She cut it shorter. It didn’t help.

We put Johnny’s boxes in the backyard. My aunt wouldn’t allow them in her house. Whenever we sorted through his things, we had to wear old, dirty shirts, strip them off outside and immediately throw the clothes away. My aunt had trash bags and towels ready for us so we could go right into the shower from the yard.

Uncle Johnny, as a veteran, was buried under an American flag. He had asked to be buried in his Boy Scout uniform, which only fueled speculation that he had been a pedophile.

He gave all of his belongings to a woman he had met in Florida over fifty years ago. No one in our family knew who she was. Was she a lover? A friend? She was certainly the only person who knew his secret, his pain. Everyone was eager to know who the mystery woman was. She could answer questions—What did he see in Korea? Why didn’t he ever get married? Was he gay? Was he unable to perform? Why did he volunteer with children during his adult life, but never have any of his own?

And the cats—Why did he have forty cats? Why did he kill himself? And why didn’t he leave a note?

The woman in Johnny’s will was, of course, dead.

She had lived a relatively short but vibrant life. She worked as a nurse, she had two children. She married later in life, after her children had grown. She played the piano. She had curly hair. She had met Johnny when he went to Florida, and they spent only a week together.

My grandpa stopped asking people why Johnny hadn’t left a note. He had bypass surgery soon after the funeral. I think he wanted to die—I think he was disappointed to wake up and see his daughters and myself crying tears of worry and happiness, his new hospital diet of bland food, his new physical therapy schedule.

Uncle Johnny’s soul was probably like his house—too complicated to fix, too broken from the inside, something a trim and a new pair of dress pants couldn’t save. It was filled with holes where critters chewed through the foundation, hid from daylight until they became feral, fought and made love with each other. And, ultimately, it was easier to destroy than to repair.

_______

Note: This post originally appeared here.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #4: Dancing with the Woman Who Tried to Sell Me

26 Monday Oct 2015

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On Top of It #4 by Lisa Martens

Dancing with the Woman Who Tried to Sell Me

A week ago, my oldest aunt remarried. This meant I would have to see her mother, my maternal grandmother. My mom and her sisters whispered to me. Could we be in the same car? How would we interact? We couldn’t be at the bridal shower together.

I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother since I graduated from college in 2010. I had quietly studied, quietly paid my bills, quietly worked and wrote papers—and then when the time came to receive my diploma, my grandmother decided to dig up a twenty-year-old skeleton: I had been in foster care as a baby, as my then-teenage mother hadn’t felt fit to raise me.

“You should let me go to her graduation ceremony instead of you,” my grandmother had told my mom. She felt that my mother was undeserving. She was claiming me—claiming something I had achieved without her.

This was the last in a long series of straws—there was her affair with painkillers, which became obvious when she had driven me out to Deer Park and became too high to drive back, and then there was her racism, which caused her to slap me if I spoke in Spanish, and then there was the casual way she would tell strangers that I didn’t know my Latino father, that he was a bastard who had abandoned me, and that he was lazy.

So after I graduated college, I stopped talking to my grandmother. I didn’t argue. I simply told her I didn’t want to speak to her anymore. There was no fighting. The fighting had happened when I was a child, and her psychosis was stale now. Her daughters had given up trying to intervene or get her off drugs. She would not stop, there was nothing to save. Her daughters’ tears had no impact except to push her further into denial, so they stopped crying. My mother complained.

“She wakes up in the middle of the night and sees things. She just walks around, then she doesn’t remember it.”

There’s a strange power my grandmother she has over her four daughters—Once I stopped talking to her, my mom started lying about being on the phone with me. “I’m talking to my friend Janet,” she said. I was upset the first time, then became hard.

The second time I graduated, I received my MFA. My parents flew in to see me graduate. My dad took me out for drinks the night before the ceremony. I had a cold and didn’t want to stay out late—We ended up going to Harlem and Brooklyn, with my dad complaining I couldn’t keep up with him. Then he told me about how my grandmother received custody of me after I came back from foster care. There was a stipulation that she could not transfer custody of me to anyone else except my own parents.

“This pissed her off because she had a family lined up to sell you to, and then she couldn’t.”

I didn’t drink after he told me that. I didn’t want to cry. Sell me? The more troubling part was that my body and mind didn’t reject the idea. It seemed plausible. The idea that she would want me for the sake of wanting me was what struck me as odd—the idea that she would want me to sell me to someone made sense. It moved through my heart like a lump of fat.

My grandmother and I have the same shoe size. We both have small feet and a petite frame. She had expensive shoes and bags, gifts from lovers, that she had given to me when she felt she was too old for them. I wore a pair of her shoes to my aunt’s wedding. They were red Cole Haans . . . more of a dark maroon than a true red, since I remembered from her first wedding that red was bad luck.

My baby cousins, three boys, were all over me during the ceremony. They all wanted to be the ring bearer. Then, after the “boring part” (the actual ceremony), they all wanted to throw rocks at the fake waterfall outside the hall, and of course they wanted me to watch.

“Chi-chi, I got it in there! Did you see? I’m going to do it again!”

“Cousin Lisa, look at this big rock I found!”

“Chi-chi, do you have a ball?”

As I watched the boys play in their little suits with pink and purple pocket squares, I wondered how high or drunk I would have to be to smack one of them for counting in Spanish, or to tell one of them that their father was a lazy bastard. I wondered what kind of place I would have to be in to drive them out to the edge of Long Island and then take too many pills to drive back—Instead leaving them scrambling for quarters for a pay phone. It was not a good place.

It was time for the reception. The three boys walked in together, all claiming to be ring bearers. The one who was actually the ring bearer graciously shared the credit. They put on cheap shades and top hats and danced.

My grandmother’s face had many more lines on it than I remembered. She was looking down, around, down, smiling, looking down, up, up, around—She didn’t seem like that cruel woman. I was afraid, actually, that she would fall down. I asked her if she wanted me to fix her a plate from the cocktail hour.

“Just a glass of red wine.”

I got her a glass, even though I didn’t want to. I was complicit in her substance abuse.

Then it happened—She saw the shoes I was wearing and commented on them. Somehow, through her haze, she recognized them. She took my hand to dance, and I did. I started dancing with the woman who tried to sell me, while wearing her shoes.

It lasted for only a moment, and then little hands reached up to grab my dress, to save me from thinking too much. The boys were bored, and they wanted to leave the reception hall. There was a rock that was left unthrown, maybe, or they wanted to sneak into the room where all the girls had put on their makeup. Our long eyelashes and pink cheeks were mysterious to them.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #3: Don’t Let EL James Ruin Fanfic

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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On Top of It #3 by Lisa Martens

Don’t Let EL James Ruin Fanfic

I’m not a fan of the Twilight or Fifty Shades franchises, but I can appreciate that Fifty came from fanfiction, because I think there is a great community around fanfiction, and it’s constantly dissed and ignored, no matter how much it grows. But EL James, why are you disrespecting Mom?

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about:  For the 10th anniversary of the Twilight series, Meyer has released a gender flipped version of the book called Life and Death. In this one, the dude is the teenage mortal with perpetual derp face, and the vampire is a chick.

But this wasn’t what Twilight fans were expecting. For years now, Meyer has been working on and off again on a retelling of the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view.

If this sounds familiar, it’s also the premise of Grey, the new Fifty Shades book told from the perspective of, that’s right, Christian Grey.

EL James, what are you doing? I enjoy some erotic, awkward fanfiction as much as the next person. You got very lucky (as someone who has read parts of the book and has experimented with bondage, I can safely testify that you got very, very, VERY lucky, and that maybe your editor is neither familiar with American English slang nor with sex), but why are you hurting your mom? You’re a millionaire now. You can come up with your own bad ideas, and people will read them. Or, at the very least, start stealing ideas from people who are more low key.

To be clear, I’m not telling you to steal ideas. You just seem to be doing that anyway, so you should be smarter about it.

Do you like the Twilight series anymore? Have you forgotten where you came from? You were basically Tina Belcher with a Blackberry. You blew up, a lot of very dissatisfied women bought your book on Kindle so they wouldn’t have to admit to owning it (until it became so popular that it became cool to hold a copy in public), and now here you are, still taking ideas from Stephanie Meyer, and ruining her release because of it.

And for everyone harping on and on about how Shakespeare shouldn’t be converted into modern English and how Amazon is the death of publishing, loosen up and read some goddamn erotic fanfiction. I’m tired of going to AWP conferences and seeing pompous assholes scoff at it.

Fifty Shades happens to be a terrible example, and I can understand how it’s more ammo for your arsenal, but there is also a lot of good writing and a very open, non-judgemental community out there.

Besides, your kids probably wouldn’t even be reading if it weren’t for Tumblr or Wattpad.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #2: The Angel of Liquor at the Brooklyn Book Festival

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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Brooklyn Book Festival, Rachel Eliza Griffiths

On Top of It #2 by Lisa Martens

The Angel of Liquor at the Brooklyn Book Festival

This year marked the 10-year anniversary of the Brooklyn Book Festival. I love the festival; I volunteered last year, and have been behind the booth a couple times. So I went to the Brooklyn’s Book Festival with every intention of attending the panels and meeting new writers.

Processed with VSCOcam with c1 preset

Instead, I bought two books and went drinking with two friends at the Mexican restaurant across the street. My friend Isabelle actually referred to me as “the angel of liquor” because I spotted the word “tequila” through the awnings, courthouse buildings, white tents and trees.

image2My MFA friends were posting photos of the panels with all these really deep captions about what they had learned, all while I was comfortable flirting with the bartender/personal trainer who gave me a free jalapeño margarita.

I regret nothing.

Once we were sufficiently drunk, we returned to the festival. I found a book I had helped edit when I interned at Akashic (Tehran at Twilight, go buy it), chatted with one of my undergraduate professors (she told my Freshman composition class to have meaningless sex at least once, as she had in some party in the mountains), and then I felt like I had accomplished enough to go home.

When I recognize people and/or things, I feel oddly proud of myself.

The festival was all cut up due to the construction, and sadly only really lasted one day.

Processed with VSCOcam with m5 preset

Photo credit: instagram/ladyizzo

Honestly, the best part of the Brooklyn Book Festival was the series of free Bookend Events. It started with a Tumblr party at The Bell House. No books were involved in this event, unless you count the erotic novel I read while waiting on line. I requested “Fuckin’ Problems” and DJ Shiftee was kind enough to spin it.

On Friday, September 21, the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series really tugged at my heartstrings. The reading was held at St. Ann & Holy Trinity Church, so I felt kind of weird drinking in a house of God, but I got over it.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a rock star poet with a soft-spoken voice. She’s also a photographer. Check out her amazing hair over on her Instagram feed.

Oh, and her poetry made me want to rip out my heart and never have babies so I could never feel pain ever again.

Something like that.

_______

Lisa Martens

Lisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

On Top of It #1: The Cube

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in On Top of It

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Lisa Martens, On Top of It

On Top of It #1 by Lisa Martens

The Cube

I live in half of a living room in Harlem. My room calls it “The Cube” or, more preciously, the “open-plan Japanese-style abode.”

The Cube is roped off by bookshelves and generic Chinese screens, like in massage rooms. Sometimes the room separators fall down, so I have piles of books that I use as curtains. Atop one stack: Jurassic Park, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, and Slavoj Zizek’s God in Pain.

The Cube

The above photo of the screens show the view of my cube from the kitchen. The photo with the bed, desk, and painting of a feminine man tied up shows my cube when it’s clean (a rarity).

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset

The first and only time I had sex in The Cube was when I first moved in and literally just owned a mattress on the floor. I hope I provided a classy experience for that gentleman.

I got a smaller bed for The Cube so I could fit a desk, which is where I am writing from right now.

I moved to New York ten years ago. I lived in Long Island, went to Long Island University, then switched to NYU, moved to Queens, then Hell’s Kitchen (where I also lived in a living room), then back to Long Island, then to Costa Rica for a few months, back to Queens, then Harlem, then Brooklyn, and now I’m back in Harlem. I briefly lived in my old office, on Governors Island, and in the architecture building of CCNY. I’ve been getting through this city as successfully as someone walking through the Grand Canyon on glass bottles.

I’m on top of it.

My short-term goals include working for cash. Keeping my loans out of default is also relatively important.

Getting consistently laid would be nice, but really I want the INEZ by Lelo, which is the Masarati of vibrators.

My ultimate hope is to get Instagram famous and then get a book deal and then fade into obscurity. I also aspire to wear boots all the time, even when naked.

Maybe I’ll adopt a kid or two one day.

Right now, I’m as stable as Wile E. Coyote wearing a jetpack (if he had student loans).

I’m on top of it.

See you next Monday.

_______

12067174_10100962425284175_628850930_nLisa Martens (Episode 22) currently lives in Harlem. In her past 10 years in New York, she has lived in a garage on Long Island, a living room in Hell’s Kitchen, the architecture building of CCNY, and on the couch of a startup. She grew up in New York, Costa Rica and Texas, and she’s still not sure which of these is home. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from CCNY. Her thesis, What Grows in Heavy Rain, is available on Amazon. Check out her website here. Follow her on Instagram here.

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